tiresome but nonetheless always sure of itself

Socialism or Barbarism

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Imagine a woman who sells everything she owns to afford her child’s chemotherapy.

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This woman must now work two or three jobs to afford her debt and a measly apartment in a rundown part of town. The kid survives but now attends an underfunded school, and has less parental help because her mom is so stressed and busy.

When she turns 18, there is no money for college, in fact, she’s had to keep a job of her own for years to help pay the bills and is struggling to graduate high school. Now that she is no longer a dependent, her mother’s health insurance, assuming she had any whatsoever, drops the daughter. She is unable to obtain her own because of a pre-existing condition.

The cancer relapses but goes undetected. The mother is now destitute, with no way to save her daughter, through no fault of her own. To keep her home and pay for her daughters funeral, she must go to work in a hotel where wealthy men order $20 cocktails from her and undertip saying “they actually make $4.50 per hour in LA, they don’t tell you that.”

The woman buries her kid and still has to work for her entire life to pay off the treatment that didn’t save her.

Now, tell me who is guilty of coercion – the social democrat who can clearly point the way to universal single payer healthcare, or the plutocrat who cuts billions in taxes for himself to deny this woman and her child a life.

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Tell me she isn’t justified in taking up arms against such a system.

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This has been the story for so many of the American underclass for so long. The few forces that keep it under wraps – racism and the police state, the pervasive media and consumer environment, what little social safety net there is for those who qualify – will not be strong enough to prevent an uprising once the large majority is underfoot. Trump is a symptom of this phenomenon. But now that he is in power, that rage will swing the other way.

If you live in a red district and you can hear me, impress this upon your representatives and your peers: There will be unrest if people’s humanity is denied. You may feel safe in persecuting minorities because white supremacy is so powerful. But there less and less of a white ‘middle class’ economic security left to cushion your constituents from the ruin you are about to bring. Those constituents blame Obama for their problems now, but at least he tried to keep Medicare and Medicaid in place. He didn’t shut down the government and threaten Social Security.

After you succeed in wiping out the scant redistributism that still remains, the society will degrade and your constituents will have no where to turn. And they will be there for you, at the gates.